We finally see some Hololens development details...

After what seems like an eternity (but in reality was about 1 year) we now have quite a bit of information about the Hololens. Perhaps even more interesting is that we have a pretty good picture of what development for the device will look like. If you haven't seen it already, you can start looking on the Development Overview page for a good introduction.

Right off the bat, it was great to see that Microsoft is supporting both a Unity based development model and a more traditional development model where you can work in C++ or any of the other usual suspects for UWP applications (JavaScript, C#, or VB). I like playing around in Unity, but after being away from C++ for a while I start to get a little anxious... Anyways, there is lots of documentation there and some interesting tidbits about how applications will be interacting with the Hololens itself.

I'm also very happy to see some of the Academy content, which is essentially step by step tutorials to get you started. Having this type of content prior to the device being released is a nice change of pace from any of the big tech companies, and I hope this is a trend that continues as more and more VR and AR headsets are released.

While I am fortunate enough to be in the first wave of headsets coming out, it is also an excellent idea to have an emulator be a first class citizen. $3000 is a whole bunch of money, and the devices will be limited in supply initially, so providing a way for people to work on their programs without a device is a great thing that again I hope catches on in the industry. From the looks of it, the emulator should be pretty capable so I'm looking forward to giving it a spin myself when it is released.

Our next checkpoint is going to be at the BUILD conference at the end of March, where I would expect the bits to finally be released and of course more details to be made available. Microsoft has been killing it with their Hololens announcements, so hopefully this one goes out with a bang to the developers!

So how about you guys - is anyone out there planning to build some AR programs with the Hololens? Do you have any opinions on the documentation after reading through it? This is just the beginning, so be sure to provide as much feedback as you can to the Hololens team as it will only help improve the final product in the end.

I am planning to integrate Hololens with Hieroglyph 3, so it should be fun to build up the framework around the Holographic APIs. I'll be sure to continue posting here about my progress, so stay tuned!

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I haven't had much of a chance to do the integration on the C++ side, although I have been doing some work with Unity to understand the capabilities of the device. Hopefully my free time situation will improve soon, so that might change...